Feminist Criticism & Gender Theory Flashcards
What poems does Woolf quote
‘There has fallen a splendid tear’ - Tennyson
‘My heart is like a singing bird’ - Christina Rossetti
Chapter 2 of a room of ones own?
British library - ‘are you aware that you are perhaps the most discussed animal in the universe?’ - small size of brain of, mental, moral, and physical inferiority of
How patriarchy functions (Woolf)
‘When the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with that inferiority, but with his own superiority’
Woolf interlinking Marxism
‘Genius like Shakespeare’s was not borne labouring, uneducated, servile people… genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working classes.’
Quote about lost novelists (Woolf)
‘When one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed… even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor’
Lady Winchilsea, born 1661
‘How are we fallen! Fallen by mistaken rules,
And Education’s more than Nature’s fools;
Debarred from all improvements of the mind,
And to be dull, expected and designed’
How was Lady Winchilsea satirised by Pope or gay according to Woolf?
‘A blue stocking with an itch for scribbling’
Margaret of Newcastle quote
‘Women live like Bats or Owls, labour like Beasts, and die like Worms…’
Woolf on Behn
‘All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.’
Biggest change towards end of 18th century for Woolf
‘The middle-class woman began to write.’
Jane Eyre quote by Woolf
‘Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot…. women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do’
Woolf on the sentence
‘there was no common sentence ready for her use.’
‘That is a man’s sentence.. it was a sentence unsuited for a woman’s use. Charlotte Brontë, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description. Jane Austen looked at it and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it. Thus, with less genius for writing than Charlotte Brontë, she got infinitely more said.’
Woolf on the letter ‘I’
‘The worst of it is that in the shadow of the letter ‘I’ all is shapeless as mist’
Capital letters Woolf
‘One blushes at all these capital letters as if one had been caught eavesdropping at some purely masculine orgy’
What is fatal for Woolf
‘It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple… in any way to speak consciously as a woman’
Judith Butler
Published Gender Trouble 1990 & critiques feminine identity as having a concrete form
Simone de Beauvoir quote
‘One is not born a woman, it rather becomes one.’
Chapter 1 Gender Trouble
The subjects of sex/gender/desire
- views term ‘women’ as problematic
Chapter 2 gender trouble
‘Prohibition, psychoanalysis, and the production of the heterosexual matrix’
Chapter 3 Gender Trouble
Subversive body acts - gender subverted through masquerade and drag
